Daily Devotional • June 3
A Reading from Luke 10:1-17
1 After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go. 2 He said to them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.3 Go on your way; I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves.4 Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals, and greet no one on the road.5 Whatever house you enter, first say, ‘Peace to this house!’ 6 And if a person of peace is there, your peace will rest on that person, but if not, it will return to you. 7 Remain in the same house, eating and drinking whatever they provide, for the laborer deserves to be paid. Do not move about from house to house. 8 Whenever you enter a town and its people welcome you, eat what is set before you; 9 cure the sick who are there, and say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’ 10 But whenever you enter a town and they do not welcome you, go out into its streets and say, 11 ‘Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet, we wipe off in protest against you. Yet know this: the kingdom of God has come near.’ 12 I tell you, on that day it will be more tolerable for Sodom than for that town.
13 “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the deeds of power done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes. 14 Indeed, at the judgment it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon than for you. 15 And you, Capernaum,
will you be exalted to heaven?
No, you will be brought down to Hades.
16 “Whoever listens to you listens to me, and whoever rejects you rejects me, and whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me.”
17 The seventy-two returned with joy, saying, “Lord, in your name even the demons submit to us!”
16 Then he said to me, Mortal, I am going to break the staff of bread in Jerusalem; they shall eat bread by weight and with fearfulness; and they shall drink water by measure and in dismay. 17 Lacking bread and water, they will look at one another in dismay, and waste away under their punishment.
Meditation
We tend to affiliate the prophetic ministry of sign-acts and warnings of future destruction with the Hebrew Scriptures, yet even here in the Gospel of Luke, we see the prophetic role continue in the early commissioned ministry of the disciples. The seventy-two are sent out with specific instructions regarding what to wear, how to act, what to say, and while their explicit mission is one of proclaiming the arrival of the Kingdom of God (with signs following – healings, demons cast out, and the like), there are consequences for those who treat these prophet-disciples poorly.
On the one hand, such consequences might be there for the spiritual encouragement of the seventy-two–perhaps a bit of a safety-net as Jesus has already testified that he is sending them as “lambs amid wolves.” Yet Jesus follows up his encouragement with his own prophetic declaration against Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum, all places that he lists as worse than the locales encountered by the Prophets.
The prophetic call of the Church is not without conflict or tension. Again, there is a danger here–especially in American Christianity–to confuse our temerity with prophetic clarity. The call to prophetic witness is not a call to hellfire and brimstone, nor is it a call to confuse our particular moral scruples with the proclamation of God. Just as with Ezekiel, the call for the seventy-two is to put their bodies on the line in service of the Kingdom, to transform their lives into sign-acts of wonderment and curiosity, and to let God do the sifting with those who respond (or fail to respond) to the proclaimed message.
Ian Edward Caveny serves as pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Alton in south-central Illinois and as an occasional lecturer for the John Martinson Honors Program at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.
♱
Daily Devotional Cycle of Prayer
Today we pray for:
All Saints Church, Chevy Chase, Maryland
The Diocese of Mpumalanga – The Anglican Church of Southern Africa
